A couple of water drop shots from this weekend that I took while snowed in...

jobodaho wrote:EDIT: Here is the setup...in case you were curious...

Ohh, it's always fun to see how other people are doing their shots together with the results, even better when the results are that good. Love the form of the second shot above. Been thinking of experimenting a bit with drops at some point, but first up is greyscale inspired by the game Limbo I played this weekend.

Its sad to not see any new pictures posted here . I'm planning on bringing my camera to the mountains when I go again here in a few weeks. Hopefully I'll get some great shots , i felt like a moron for not bringing it and having to use my phone for pictures. Just doesn't do it justice. Any suggestions of a cheap/good wide angel lens for a Sony A230? (Can take the old Minolta lens). I'm thinking something almost fish-eye in order to get some great shots up there with more mountains in it. Hmmmm, also... what about Panoramic shots, I believe the 230 has built in features for it, but something seemed off when I tried it, and I wasn't sure how to move the camera without it dipping. I know lightroom is supposed to be able to match a few pictures together.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

All I know is, I shot close to a thousand frames around the holidays, and even at a 40% discard rate, it's just been taking forever to get them sorted. So I got nothing new because I didn't want to accumulate another 200+ on top of that

Looks like some of the flowering trees will be blossoming early around here, though, assuming no cold snap to freeze their little buds off. So in a couple weeks I might have something interesting to shoot again.

I am sitting in a hospital room as I type this while my wife is on bed rest, she is carrying our twins and we are not too far away from being parents...which is crazy to think about...so I have a feeling my "photography for fun" might be taking a hit soon

jobodaho wrote:I has been a while since some images have been posted...

I am sitting in a hospital room as I type this while my wife is on bed rest, she is carrying our twins and we are not too far away from being parents...which is crazy to think about...so I have a feeling my "photography for fun" might be taking a hit soon

CONGRATS, that is amazingly great news! At least she knows that you guys will have the best of growing up photos . Ever think about doing that whole 1 shot a day or week compiled into a video, especially with twins to show if they grow at different rates during different periods of time. Crazy, well I wish you the best with the twins, I think your new past time might end up = nap time because your going to be getting very little sleep my friend

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

jobodaho wrote:So I have a feeling my "photography for fun" might be taking a hit soon

Nah...it will just get a new pair of subjects

Maybe put together some nice mother-and-child shots and expand your portfolio? A couple of the young mothers in my broader social group always love to receive candid shots of their kids, because I can hang out with them during e.g. dinner prep and get fleeting poses and angles that never show up in the usual party and group photos.

Ford's Evos concept from 2011, now officially on tour as the 2013 Fusion to be released later this year:

The new new Beetle was present, and it looks even better in real life than in photos:

A heavily modded Kia Rio. Interestingly, those wheels had almost no offset, the extension was entirely in the axle hardware:

The one (okay, two) cars I absolutely wanted to see: the Scion FR-S/Subaru BRZ twins. I know what my next car will be after the '02 Celica GT-S reaches EOL:

A couple Fisker Karmas on display. For scale, note that those are 22-inch wheels:

And finally, to end on a very high note: A heavily modded De Tamosa Pantera. The owner and builder's father was on hand to chat up the crowd, allegedly this thing is good for 600hp and can exceed 200mph on the raw engine alone. With the NoS boost it hits 900hp and gets to 60mph in under 3 seconds:

There was more, including a several muscle cars and a couple factory tricked-out FJ Cruisers, Tundras, and Jeep Wranglers, and a Mercedes Gullwing that was regrettably displayed in such a way that I couldn't get any good angle on it, although it was beautiful from any vantage point. But this here captures most of the good stuff.

A quick selection of spring flowers, all shot in either the Colorado front range or the Pasadena, California area. The purple-leaf sand cherries and lilacs aren't out yet, but some of the flowering crabapples and forsythias are in full bloom, and of course in southern California pretty much everything is in its spring blooming cycle. Canon 7D again, and every one of these shot with the EF-S 60mm f/2.8 macro USM, typically around f/5.6 or so. This really is an excellent macro lens for APS-C.

I think this is a Select-A Sargent crabapple:

Forsythia shrub:

Prairie Fire Crabapple:

Some sort of crabapple, not sure on the variety:

Another Sargent crabapple:

Bottle Brush tree:

Lemon tree:

Fuschia tree:

Definitely more showy than 2011, not nearly as showy as 2010, but you takes what you gets.

My wanderings are over again until the summer hiking season comes back, so here's a final photo dump from the downtown area of Pasadena, California. Canon 7D, and all images shot with the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 XR DiII.

West entrance to the All Saints Church:

Pasadena City Hall. The structure was built in the late 1920s with strong renaissance influences, and encompasses a central courtyard in the style of an old southwestern fort. The structure has appeared in a number of western movies:

The early evening sun was almost perpendicular to the east-west sides of the building:

Closeup of the courtyard fountain:

The southeast corner tower:

Friend and his daughter in one of the west entrances:

Pasadena also has an old public library. Out front, a young reader poses on the fountain:

The interior matches perfectly to every "old university library" scene ever filmed:

Next up, the Gamble House. Built in 1908 by David and Mary Gamble (of Proctor & Gamble), the home is a classic "arts and crafts" architecture and eschews nails everywhere except for the wood shingles. Instead, all of the structure (and even the decorative trim on the windows) is assembled with notches and pegs, taking on some classical Japanese cues in the process. The exterior view also served as Doc's mansion in Back to the Future:

The rear patio:

Lastly, the Colorado Bridge, which has served as a backdrop in many movies:

Here are a couple shots of the Venus transit on Tuesday. Anyone else watch it or take photos? Clouds almost ruined it for me, but there was just enough space between them and the horizon to snap off a few shots before the sun set.If I was smart, I would've bought some solar filter material for better results. I guess it didn't really matter though since clouds blocked most of the show till sunset when I didn't need a filter.

Last edited by bobboobles on Thu May 29, 2014 8:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I spent the last two days doing event photography. The RC club of which I am a member holds an annual warbirds event. Both mornings provided some of the most challenging shooting conditions I've been in. Friday was especially rough as we had a silver gray overcast all morning and the way our flying field is set up, all the planes are backlit when flying before noon. Good metering was darn near impossible.

I did have the fortune to get to try out a Nikon D800. A good camera won't make up for a lousy photographer, but that camera takes some beautiful pictures. I wasn't even using it near its capability either. I was shooting at 20MP instead of 30 to help manage the amount of data I generated. Between the two days I shot well over 5000 images and about 1500 were worth keeping for one reason or another. Probably 100 are worth sending to be printed and there are a few that I'm going to have large prints done of.

I had two cameras with me: A D300s with a Nikkor 18-200 VR lens and the D800 with a Nikkor 70-200 VR F2.8 and a 1.4x teleconverter. Both lenses had circular polarizers on them. As I noted above, I was shooting mainly for the web so I was shooting JPEG on the highest quality setting with compression set for file priority on both cameras. Even so, I ended up with about 9GB of images. No post processing other that resize has been applied to any of these shots. There are all as they came from the camera. Both cameras had their color balance set to "vivid" and white balance set to auto.

Click for the full resolution versions....

You can see the very uniform, monochrome sky in the background...

I had the focus on the farther plane on purpose as I had been following him, but the way this image is framed I really wish it had been on the front plane.

This is one of the top five shots from the weekend. It was late in the day on Friday and the sun was low in the sky give a very nice soft yellow light.

These are big planes, most of them being over 80" wingspan, but tracking a even an object that size on a tight zoom 75' away when it is moving at 125mph+ takes some work. I really like the D800 and the F2.8 70-200 combo, but I can tell you, you'd better be in shape if you are going to lug that around all day. It's heavy.

Late in the day on Saturday, again, nice soft light.

This is the reason I shoot such a long lens on these events. Up close and personal with the danger...

This is another of the top five shots from the weekend and it came from the D300s. The light on both afternoons was just wonderful and enhanced an already beautiful Stearman.

This will give you some idea on the craftsmanship and detail that goes into some of these planes. Some of them are really museum quality pieces and then these guys go and bore holes in the sky with them.

Another of the top five. This is a rocket launched, RC controlled glider model of the SR-71. This was taken with the D300s. The one "failing" of the D800 is that it's continuous shooting speed is somewhat limited due to the size of the images. The D300s will take somewhere around 10 frames per second on high speed continuous mode.

Both cameras did an excellent job with focus and tracking, even with the high speeds and occasional lack of contrast.

This may be my favorite shot of the weekend. Saturday afternoon we had some be puffy clouds start building and they provided a wonderful background.

With 30 MP to play with, you might have gotten away with a bit of cropping to compensate for difficult tracking. Of course, you've still got to get the focus, even if you're willing to accept getting the target slightly off-center in the frame.

JustAnEngineer wrote:With 30 MP to play with, you might have gotten away with a bit of cropping to compensate for difficult tracking. Of course, you've still got to get the focus, even if you're willing to accept getting the target slightly off-center in the frame.

And that is the real problem, focus. I've got several shots that will crop down nicely, but even well focused ones drop significantly in sharpness.

Hello all, it has been a long time since I last posted. My wife and I are now proud parents of twins, and the last three months have been the craziest of my life...but in a good way! I haven't been doing too much personal photography during this time, but I was able to get out a week ago to do some star photography. I drove around for hours looking for a cool structure for the foreground of the images, and finally ran across what looked like an old grain storage bin that had lost its roof and started to collapse...funny thing is instead of just tearing it down they just farm around it. Hope you like them!

On a whim I did hike the St. Mary's Glacier (technically a semi-seasonal ice field) trail last Saturday, and by pure chance, I was walking past the lake on my way out just as a lot of shouting arose from across the water. Seems a group of six kids decided to get high the old fashioned way: by climbing up there. The fact that they were all wearing swimsuits suggested I needed a telephoto lens for whatever was happening next, so I popped my bag and suited up the 7D with the Tokina AT-X 80-200mm f/2.8, then bumped the ISO to 1600 so I could shoot at f/9.

What happened next is that they each took a 35-foot jump into 40F water. It's roughly a tenth of a mile across the lake so after the first one went, it took about a half second between seeing the splash and hearing a very loud KER-FWUMP. The other five then followed in succession, although one of the guys clearly had some second thoughts for a couple minutes. Definitely worth the price of admission.

Until I got home and sorted my photos on a large monitor, I didn't realize I had enough resolution to catch an aftermath reaction: Yes, it probably DOES sting.